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Showing posts from April, 2011

April 30

Spring break-up now, the snow soft & thinning into a rhizomatic patchwork of puddle & brown runnel, & the tundra scrub peaking through the black dirt, tired & distended with water. & then come those waning hours of darkness, the stars become fugitive already, the windows covered over in the hope of some small night’s sleep. The bears already roaming at every altitude, the throngs of people already doing the same, & that perfect quiet of our winter opening again unto life & busyness & externality in all of its incarnations. It starts like that, a little bird-call, isolated that way, & then turns to the madrigal & the chorus & then that becomes the familiar ringing in your ear summerlong. There is that attendant hesitation to participate, that part of me that doesn’t want to loosen my grasp on winter & all of its insular comforts. But we are animals, after all, & hibernation gives way to the pulse of things around us. & once the rot

April 16

I think I could live a dozen lifetimes & not scratch the surface of what I want to do in this state. Looking over pictures of Bering Land Bridge & Kobuk Valley has spurred in me a new yearning to head north & west, toward those unfathomable sweeps of tundra valley & those rolling, languid rivers. & all of it, all of it unpeopled. I see the patchwork of vermillion & blazing gold, the heavy cerulean sky with its spires of slow cloud, the maars at Devil Mountain, & I want to start walking. Or I see the undulating hills that conjure to my thinking a hugely amplified facsimile of western Iowa, covered entire in thick, wind-driven snow, back-dropped by looming ranges in the distance, & I want to harness a dog team & mush into it instead. & the more I think about the purpose of preserving wilderness (the more I talk to Kristin about it & the more I steal an education in it from her), the more I think a place like Kobuk or BELA would feel like home.

April 9

It’s a swift work time does, & then there’s our inclination toward epochism hanging over it, begging its taxonomies. Call it an ocean when it’s a multitude of wave & current. Call it a river when it’s eddies & silt & braided channels & fluxing limns of shore. I think of the last decade that way, thinking it through its recognizable consistencies, as if they speak to some breed of continuity, or as if they need to. Somehow that sense that we tame the past in the discovery of its patterns, that we stitch a quilt of its disparate parts & are somehow contented to pull it over us in sleep. It’s an odd inclination, tamping things down when at their base there’s really only disparity. (Even comparison actively calls attention to fundamental separation, even as it yokes together). It makes you wonder. This morning, it makes me wonder at how we revise experience, & how those revisions alter over time. What clings to them, what falls away, & what within us finds g